Category: Education

NEW UPDATE:
1200 Demonstrate at Governor’s San Diego Office

By Hoa Quach / SDNN

A daylong effort against budget cuts led by student organizers throughout the San Diego region concluded with about 1,200 protesters gathering outside Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s San Diego office late Thursday afternoon.

UPDATE:
Californians Protest Education Cut-backs – UC Davis students try to block highway

Trying to keep on top of the March 4 Day of Action? Here are a few resources that you’ll definitely find useful.

Student Sources

* UC Regent Live(blog) will have a team of writers covering national events throughout the day.
* The blog Occupy CA has been breaking stories about radical protest actions all year.
* This site will of course be passing on everything we get.
* Our national March 4 map includes links and contact information for many local actions.
(SEE INSIDE FOR LINKS AND MORE …)

March 4th Actions Begun in California Have Spread Across Nation

Rally and march in San Diego today at 3pm precedes teachers’ march to Sacramento

With our state government paralyzed and public services as fundamental as education and roads cash-starved and crumbling, it’s easy to forget that California is still the world’s 8th-largest economy. We have riches — and they can be directed toward our common good.

The once-great state of California is self-destructing through irresponsible tax policies stretching back 32 years to Proposition 13, which made it so hard to raise taxes — requiring a two-thirds vote of the Legislature — that the state can’t generate the revenue for its basic needs.

No one has confirmed that Black shock-comedian was behind the racist February Compton Cookout

Student Activism / March 1, 2010

Okay, I guess I have to address this, since it’s coming up more and more often in comments on my coverage of the UC San Diego situation: There is NO evidence that the black shock-comedian “Jiggaboo Jones” was behind last month’s racist “Compton Cookout” at UCSD. None. Zero.

Here’s the deal.

Sometime in early-to-mid-February, the invitation to the Compton Cookout party was posted on Facebook. As word of the party got around, complaints began to mount, and on February 16 the UCSD administration condemned the event.

The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper, has printed a statement that it says was written by the student who hung a noose in the campus library last week.

The student — who remains anonymous — claims that last Tuesday, two days before the noose was found, a friend of hers fashioned it from a piece of rope she had found on the ground, “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD.” She herself then carried the noose with her to the library “and ended up hanging it at my desk.” It was, she says, “a mindless act and stupid mistake.” When she left the library hours later, “I simply forgot about it.”

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson/ Huffington Post / February 23, 2010

University of California, San Diego chancellor Marye Anne Fox, the president of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, UCSD student leaders, and a bevy of civil rights leaders, and black and minority California lawmakers leaped over each other to lambaste the now infamous Compton Cookout at UCSD as racially insulting, insensitive, and demeaning. On February 24, days after the furor broke, UCSD officials held a campus racial sensitivity teach-in to quell racial tensions on the campus.

The Compton cookout, of course, was the boneheaded stunt by a handful of white and non-white students at an off campus to mock, poke fun at, and revel in what’s presumed to be the sway and swagger of ghetto life. There’s a problem, actually, two problems with this.

SAN DIEGO — Student protesters have taken over the offices of University of California San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox as a third racially charged episode has brought a new wave of outrage.

Students are protesting atop desks and countertops throughout Fox’s suite, except for her own sanctum. They are chanting, “Real pain, real change.” Some are playing drums.

Fox has twice addressed students today, once outside the library where a noose was found last night and once in a eucalyptus grove outside her office. Students remain upset with the pace of the administration’s response to their demand for action over ongoing racial strife.

“You can’t imagine how pained we are, we are heartsick,” Vice Chancellor Penny Rue told the students on a bullhorn.New Update: UCSD campus police and president of the regents have reported that the woman student said she had two accomplices.

Some professors have called off their classes for the day and have called for a strike and “disruptive demonstrations” at the campus in protest of the now three racial incidents.

Campus police at the University of California San Diego are questioning a student who admitted she hung a noose on the seventh floor of the university library Thursday night.

Thousands of students and administrators attended a “teach-in” at UC San Diego Wednesday to address a recent ghetto-themed party intended to mock Black History Month and the racial unrest it sparked on campus, but the event was disrupted when the bulk of students in attendance walked out.

About an hour into the event at the university’s student center, two female students with the Black Student Union stood up and blasted the teach-in, with one saying, “The university and our community will not be fixed by a two-hour teach-in.”

Saying the university was doing little to address racism on campus, the pair urged their fellow students in the packed auditorium and overflow room to march out of the event, and the vast majority complied. The students filed out of the auditorium, loudly chanting “Whose university? Our university!”

As an alumnus of UCSD and veteran of the 1969 student strike over the University’s policies toward minority students, I found this week’s report of a UCSD fraternity off-campus party called the “Compton Cook-out” particularly disturbing. The party was a mock-down of ghetto culture – in the middle of Black History Month.

And then the report of the student group Koala’s campus video program promoting that event, with the use of derogatory racist language, plus a hand-written sign that was discovered with the words “Compton Lynching,” equally disturbing.

by Patrick Finley / Arizona Daily Star / February 14, 2010

TUCSON – The crowd stood and cheered. Someone handed Ernie McCray the basketball.

When the Arizona Wildcats hosted Los Angeles State at Bear Down Gym on Feb. 6, 1960, there was no scoreboard to show how many points each player had scored. No public way to document the smashing of records and preconceptions and prejudice.

The 6-foot-6 senior from Tucson High School scored 46 points – a UA record to this day.

Afterward, his teammates went to a restaurant to celebrate. McCray didn’t join them – he knew he wouldn’t be served.

by Mary E Mann

Let’s not mince words, I am willing to admit that I love the shit out of books. Much more than is probably healthy or even altogether sane. I love how they smell, how they look on my bedside table or on used bookstore shelves. I love the quiet contemplation they induce in people, the gentle low murmur of contentment that fills bookstores and libraries thick as a cat’s purr beneath its ribs. I love watching a friend or lover read, their eyes intent, their bodies in the same room as mine but their neurons a world away.

Most of all, I love reading, curled in my bed before sleep, on the couch with a cup of tea on a rainy day, stretched flat and gently roasting on the beach. I love unfurling my mind into a new, uncharted landscape, inhabited by Zorba’s and Mrs. Dalloway’s, and seeing how it fares. I am an entirely impartial defender of books.

by John Williams

Having now been in Saudi Arabia for only thirty-eight days, I have had time to develop no more than a newcomer’s perspective on this significant Gulf Region country. This is my first experience in a kingdom other than Disney’s magic one. While I can hardly help but consider the political basis of this state to be archaic, I am able to recognize that it is but one of the many systems extant on the planet today, and I can also recognize that whether it is the best or worst system currently in existence or is the best system that possibly could be developed are issues I am neither prepared nor qualified to determine, though I could, if pressed, express an opinion thereon.

If pressed, I would have to say it is unlikely that this system is the best possible system which could be created, but then to the limit of my understanding, no system is, and, further this one seems to work for its citizens. Saudis I meet spend no time complaining about their government, culture, or society.

* OB Pier Closed Due to High Surf and Damage

* Circle of Life Comes to the OB Rag

* Local Coastal Commission Manager Insists on Public Hearing Before Removal of Fire Pits by City

* Contest to Find Missing 9th OB Fire Pit

* OB Cottage Becomes Home Design Classroom

* Don’t Crap On Us

* Volunteers Needed for Dog Beach Dune Habitat Restoration Project – January 23rd

* OB Poet Hosts Poetry Reading at Jungle Java